


The Warrior Queen

by purrfectj



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dorian is a pirate, F/M, Palace Guard Cullen, Princess Trevelyan, no magic, smutty but angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 12:11:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5205416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dragon Age: Inquisition characters in a setting without magic and where Ostwick is a kingdom.</p>
<p>There are consequences to that smile, a cost he won’t count until over a decade later when an ocean of blood has washed through the kingdom and a new monarch looks down on him from a silver and steel throne and strips him of his rank. </p>
<p>A handsome, dutiful King's Guard, a shy, awkward Crown Princess, and a kingdom that nearly falls to plots and plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Warrior Queen

Cullen Rutherford is nineteen when he is conscripted from his military unit into the royal guard. There is a rumor that he has family connections but the truth is less complicated: Cullen has proven himself a capable, honorable young man and has impressed a superior who has the ear of the King. The King, in need of capable, honorable young men to guard his family, most especially the granddaughter rumor names his heir, asks to meet with him and is pleased. 

So nervous he’s cold from the armor holding in all of his flop sweat, he finds he likes the handsome King with his swept-back silver hair that is cut shorter in the back than on top, his twinkling blue eyes that crinkle at the corners when he lets out his loud, almost braying laugh, and his shrewd, calculated way of getting answers while appearing affable. The Queen Consort is more frightening with her careful courtesies and pale, angry eyes, her hand dripping in jewels kept on the King at all times. She is foreign, a second bride sold to him for grain when her country was starving, but they seem happy enough. The court whispers that she dislikes her step-daughter and step-granddaughter, though, and plots against them. 

The summons to move into the royal guardsmen barracks arrives within a sennight. 

He is given mostly to guard the King, to stand at endless attention through audiences and councils and luncheons and state dinners. It is at one of these state dinners that he is introduced to the Princess Meera, plump and shy and awkward at nine. She gives him a regal nod when he bows formally over her tiny gloved hand but doesn’t smile as she welcomes him to her grandfather’s court. “I hope you will be happy here,” she says in her surprisingly sweet voice. He smiles at her, he can’t help it, she is just so very serious and her eyes are so very, very green, green like the rolling hills near his home, green like the pretty bottles his mother kept on the windowsill full of herbs. 

There are consequences to that smile, a cost he won’t count until over a decade later when an ocean of blood has washed through the kingdom and a new monarch looks down on him from a silver and steel throne and strips him of his rank. 

Time moves both quickly and slowly in the court. Princess Meera is named Crown Princess Meera, first in line of succession ahead of her mother, when she is thirteen and Cullen is twenty-three. He is named to her personal guard. By this time he has spent many an afternoon with Meera and her grandfather, touring the gardens which are the King’s pride and Meera’s joy, hawking where the King is skilled and bloodthirsty and Meera soft-hearted and timid, and speaking in low tones in the massive library where Meera proves to have a quick, agile, imaginative mind and her grandfather scolds her for her poor posture and dumpy frame and spotty skin. He means well and loves her but the would-be Queen has yet to grow a thick skin, easily bruised by those she so desperately wishes to please. Cullen finds her a lonely, sad creature surrounded by the beautiful butterflies of the court, bullied by the Queen into ill-fitting gowns in colors that leave her skin sallow and emphasize the wrong parts of her awkward body. 

A tentative friendship develops between the young, polite, handsome guardsman and the Crown Princess, one built on a shared love of military history, an interest in music, and the trust her grandfather grants him. They are often left alone when her grandfather is called away from her by the business of being King and so they pore over dusty books together or play games of chess which Cullen wins or she plays the violin or harpsichord until she can coax him into singing in his pure tenor. In the gardens, she fascinates him with her extensive knowledge of the plants, her willingness to sink to the ground in silk and lace and dig her fingers into the soil, and the indulgent affection she engenders in the Head Gardener who is older than the dirt he turns and crotchety even to the King. When her grandfather wanders away while hawking, she strokes the feathers of her bird and asks after Cullen’s day with a shy wistfulness that makes Cullen feel somehow guilty for the slightly older widow he keeps in the city or the casually flirtatious manner most of the lovely women and girls of the court have adopted around him that Meera has not bothered to learn. 

She is not always easy to like. She can be demanding, bossy, and spoiled, prone to outbursts of nearly violent temper where basins are smashed and maids cower in fear, most often directed at her mother, a sweet, unassuming Lady with dove grey eyes and a fragile, bird-like quality. Her father is away most of the time, an ambassador to a neighboring kingdom, but comes back occasionally to upbraid his daughter and his wife in private and fawn over them in public, the perfect picture of paternal pride. Meera’s much younger brother, Prince Roark, who has no formal title, is third in the line of succession at three, a handsome toddler with bright blue eyes and raven black hair who is quite content to be doted upon by his mother and his sister, is mostly ignored by his father. He looks, everyone says, nothing like the unattractive Crown Princess and everything like the King. 

The King grants Cullen leave to teach her how to use a sword after he points out warrior Queens are known in their kingdom and mostly because the King is shrewd enough to know endless work inside wears on a man used to physical activity and the Crown Princess has startled and pleased her grandfather with her accuracy and acumen with a bow. Meera proves a reluctant and lazy pupil and it is at first difficult for Cullen despite his endless well of patience and pity that she has no aptitude that he can discover for bladed weapons. With one sword, big or small, shield or no, single or double daggers, an axe, a javelin, a spear, she is clumsy and bored and grumpy and cross. One day, frustrated beyond endurance, he barks at her to find something to amuse herself and is shocked, stunned, staggered to find her hefting two short swords and moving through the forms for sword and shield he’s taught her with a fierce, focused, frowning grace. 

It never occurs to Cullen that his easy comraderie with Meera is dangerous. 

In her fifteenth year he takes a new mistress, a woman his own age with tumbled black hair, slender limbs, and a pouting mouth, a cast-off bastard of the king of a far-off kingdom seeking refuge. She is welcomed for her beauty and her grace and is quickly a favorite among the nobility. Cullen is flattered by her attention and her presence in his bed, flattered that she would choose a lowly Royal Guard as her lover when half of the titled men of the court have their eyes on her. Though he is uncomfortable with the way she and her circle speak about Meera, the veiled references to her weight or her skin or her dowdy clothes or even to the hair she keeps pinned and braided and is a color that no one can quite discern but that Cullen knows catches fire in the sun and gleams richly in candlelight, he says nothing and does nothing to stop them. 

He says nothing and he does nothing and when Meera is removed from the succession in favor of her brother on her sixteenth nameday and sentenced, for it is a sentence and not a mercy or a marriage, to exile and she comes to him to say goodbye and finds him kissing his lover, he is not prepared for the light that goes out of those green, green eyes or the heartbreak that is so easily read on her open, honest face. When his lover turns on her, this deposed girl who is now nobody, and uses teeth and claws to flay the thin skin from her already bleeding heart, Cullen stands silently by and watches as the fragile trust of a former princess that he never knew was in love with him shatter into pieces. 

A boat carries her away over the Endless Ocean. 

The King, when asked if she arrives safely, turns to Cullen and says, only, “I am promoting you to Commander of the Royal Guard.” 

There will be no news of the former would-be Queen for five years. When the King dies suddenly not six months after her departure, a civil war breaks out. The Queen, who is no relation by blood to the Crown Prince, names herself Queen Regent with the support of much of the nobility in the capitol. The south and east rise up and call for the boy’s father in her stead. It is only when the man returns from the neighboring kingdom with an army at his back that Cullen recalls the King’s son-in-law is descended from a family who decades ago ruled when both lands were still united under one monarch. The Queen’s homeland rallies behind her, seeing an opportunity to take the rich in farmland territory to which they sold her. Cullen’s former lover of the raven hair from across the sea proves to have fabricated her tale of woe and is, in fact, the bastard daughter of the Queen with her own sworn bannermen. It comes to light that it was she and her mother who engineered Meera’s banishment, whispering into the King’s ear that the Crown Princess had been sullied by the tall, blonde, handsome guardsman, truth given to the lie when it is Cullen’s own lover who is crying to the King of the betrayal and when Meera defends him without thought to how love sounds from her innocent lips. 

It is the only time in his entire life outside of a battlefield that Cullen strikes a woman in anger. 

From civil war springs a conflict for dominance that spans the whole of three kingdoms and four factions. 

Crown Prince Roark and his mother are spirited away with Cullen’s help, protected by the King’s Mistress of Spies, the female Captain of the City Guard, a priestess, a former mercenary captain without a company, and as many loyal soldiers and spies and smallfolk as can be gathered. They make a small, guerilla company that quickly gains a reputation for their efficiency and lack of brutality and grow apace with their reputation, Cullen their de facto leader. 

He fights and he kills and he bleeds and he is captured and he is tortured and he escapes and more than once he almost dies. He gains a scar across his lip (a javelin), his back (whips), the right side of his chest (burns), his left outer thigh (sword) and countless small scrapes and nicks and the weight of a nation that is falling to ruin. 

From across the sea come tangled tales: the former princess is dead, is missing, is a slave, is a pirate, is a ghost, is a wraith, is a queen with an army at her back. It is five years to the day of her exile that a letter arrives in her nearly illegible scrawl, achingly familiar to Cullen as his heart thunders in his chest. There are no careful courtesies, only a promise: “I am coming.” 

He fights and he kills and he almost dies more than once and he wonders if he can ever bleed enough to atone for the wrong he did her. 

OoO 

Meera Trevelyan is twenty-one when she steps foot onto the shores of her homeland again. The rough men and women on the dock do not bend the knee to their former Crown Princess but they do step away from the petite, dangerous woman with the twin blades on her back, her curved body encased in tough armor that is neither pearl nor ivory nor opal but the color of tales of dragon’s scales of old, her hair catching fire in the sun, gold and brown and red. Her companions are no less wondrous or exotic: a huge bull of a man with an outsized axe and only one good eye, a handsome, smirking, brown-skinned pirate who appears to carry no weapons at all but proves to have thin, narrow blades secreted all over his person, a pale male and female, one with a bow and the other with daggers, reed-slender and feral, a band of mercenaries headed by a sweet-faced boy with shiny gold armor and a bastard sword, and an army. An army that contains stone-faced men and women who bend the knee to Meera not because she is a Princess but because she has proven herself a Queen thrice over: the Slave Queen who when taken from the ship on the Endless Ocean by slavers incited and led a successful rebellion, the Compassionate Queen who gave them their freedom and asked nothing in return, the Bewitching Queen who persuaded a pirate crew, a Champion, and a Hero to follow her or to give her reinforcements or coin or arms or armor. Her people follow her because she is one of them, because she never sets herself above them, and because her justice is as swift as her mercy. 

She promises them a home if they will help her take it. 

The Mistress of Spies greets Meera with a deep curtsey that Meera only watches impassively. There is no love for Meera for these people that abandoned her, for the country who sold her into slavery even if unwittingly, another plot of the pretender Queen. She cares only for the land and the smallfolk, the system that failed her failing them now. She is blood and stone and dirt and rust. She has killed dragons and gutted men and she will wreak vengeance on those who would keep her people in bondage. When Leliana rises, Meera says only, “I would see my brother and my mother.” 

Roark is taller than she expects, half a head more than she already and thin as a beanpole, all legs and arms and bright blue eyes that look tired. He embraces her without regard or worry for the weapons on her back or the sharp bits of her armor. He smells like boy and sour ale and his voice breaks when he calls her sister. Over his head she sees her mother watching them with sad grey eyes and her slender, elegant, trembling fingers pressed to her lips. It is in this moment Meera realizes what she’s lost because these two, these two that used to be so close in her heart, they have been removed, excised cleanly like a wound. The pirate, leaning negligently against the wall, smiles in sympathy as she pats her brother awkwardly on the back and kisses her mother on her paper-thin cheek. 

Dorian’s smile widens into a smirk when the tall, blonde, broad-shouldered, handsome, and weary man is introduced to her as the Commander and Meera stiffens as if someone has shoved one of her swords into her breast. Another echo, another wound she has willed closed with blood and death and time. His smile, lopsided and familiar, is tattered around the edges, his bow polite and formal and correct, his whiskey-colored eyes direct and still so kind. He has no right to look at her with kindness. 

“Your Majesty,” he says in the voice that reminds her of bright spring days in the garden, cold winter afternoons in the library, the first tentative stirrings of lust and love, swords in her hands and approval in his eyes, of childhood stolen and girlhood damaged. She does not even try to smile for him. 

“Commander. I have brought you an army.” She raises a haughty brow and pulls her pride around her like another layer of protection. “Have you a plan?” 

Her stomach muscles bunch and tremble when he sighs and scrubs his hand over the back of his neck and she sees the silvery scars on his arm stretch and bunch along with the muscles and tendons. She, too, has scars, a map of an undiscovered country pierced into her skin. It is a link forged between them that she must ignore, for the sake of the girl she no longer is. For the sake of a heart that no longer beats. 

The plan is solid and will be easier with the addition of her people, though the merging of her army of former slaves and pirates with his army of nobility and freefolk is bound to, and does, cause trouble. She finds herself more often than not at the Commander’s side, rearranging supply lines or handling a dispute or demanding restitution or paying a fine or creating order out of the chaos that is their people. She hates it that she falls into the old rhythm of their friendship easily, hates it that they can communicate in a shorthand that she hasn’t even been able to perfect with Bull or Dorian, that he reads her signals and her face and her voice and can anticipate what she wants, needs, or demands sometimes even before she does. 

Grudgingly and only to Sera she admits he’s good at his job and that they’re, she’s, lucky to have him. Sera leans her head on the Queen’s shoulder and whispers, “Lots of men under him. Needs a woman over him. Because positions. And you like his arse, you naughty girl.” 

The Commander’s head swings around to them when Meera snorts out the inelegant laugh that is all she has kept of her former life, Sera sinking down to lay her cheek on the Queen’s thigh as Dorian walks up to whisper in her ear, his hand on her shoulder. She feels the smile slip from her face at the censorious look their familiarity earns. She remembers a kiss that broke her heart and buries her face in Sera’s hair and refuses to feel selfish or little or small for loving these people who love her. 

She makes sure he knows she never sleeps alone in her tent. It’s petty and prideful and wrong but it is, in its way, true. 

At the next strategy meeting, the ambassador turns to her and says, brightly, “We have received an offer of marriage for the Virgin Queen. That is you, no?” The disbelieving look the Commander sends her is enough to have Meera grinding her teeth over the truth. Before they took the ship, before she persuaded Dorian and Isabela and some of the others to her side, she had male and female hands on her breasts, her back, her ass, even between her legs, and she learned more than she ever wished to know about the male cock and the female cunt, but she was a valuable prize as a maiden. Later, when she could have had her pick among her men or women, when she schemed to seduce first Bull and then Sera, desperate to feel something, anything, other than empty and sad and cold, it was Dorian who pulled her close and told her, gently, to stop. 

She is broken, a dead thing inside, and so she sleeps most often in a pile of bodies of people whom she trusts, Dorian and Sera and Cole and Bull and sometimes even one of the Bull’s Chargers, relearning her body as more than a tool of war or as a vessel to accept someone’s lust. 

Josephine is told, in no uncertain terms, there will be no marriage and no more calling her the Virgin Queen. The ambassador is quick to acquiescence while the Commander stalks away from the war table, his back straight. Meera notes, with a little chill of alarm and shock that she is, indeed, looking at his ass. 

Her father’s army is the first to come to terms, his forces nearly halved by Meera and the Commander’s combined military acumen. When they meet in the parley tent under white flags, Meera does not call him father or prince. He is a wasted man, heavy with drink and indolence and indulgence, heavy jowls and a proud peacock strut and she can see, blessedly, nothing of herself or her brother in his face. He asks after her mother and is told, fiercely, that the faith has set aside their marriage. This brings the rage she remembers so well, the towering reflection of her own childish, destructive tantrums, his fists pounding on the table, his guards snapping to attention even as they watch Cole and Krem nervously where they remain at ease behind the Queen and the Commander’s high backed chairs. Her father’s eyes nearly fall out of his skull when the tip of Meera’s blade is resting beneath his chin and yet no one seems to have moved and he was assured no one save the guards were carrying weapons. Her smile is as sharp as her blade and she means it when she says, gently, “You are nothing and will be nothing. Those of your men and women who will bend the knee to King Roark will be invited to do so. The rest, if they have committed no crimes against this kingdom, will be allowed to leave.” 

“You mean bend the knee to you, you whore. We know my son is only a puppet king to you and this Commander of yours.” 

She feels the Commander stiffen next to her and she turns to look at him, her weapon never wavering, and watches with interest as several emotions chase themselves across his face, including a flicker that makes her clench her thighs together on a sudden rush of heat. Finally, he settles on cool disdain, though she notes his fists are white-knuckled on the arms of his chair. “He is no longer your son but your King. His mother stands as Regent. We are only his servants and his vassals.” 

“And his weapons,” Meera adds and turns her sword, just a bit, so the tip digs into the loose flesh of her father’s neck. He flinches and Meera is satisfied he has understood. “As for being a whore, whom I choose to fuck, serah, is none of your concern.” She realizes the Commander thinks her barb is meant for him when he sits back and drops his eyes to the floor. 

Terms are made, treaties signed, and their numbers swell more than either the Queen or her Commander had anticipated as new recruits are drawn to the tales the bards are spinning about them and the increased demands on their time and attention has Meera short-tempered and recalcitrant, no outlet for her anger or her fear or her rage. One evening as she is stalking away from yet another endless council meeting, the Commander stops her. When she growls at him, he simply inclines his head toward the sparring ring and raises an eyebrow. 

It becomes routine, as much as it can in the midst of war and battle and strategy and too little sleep, for Commander and Queen to be seen matching her twin swords against his sword and shield, neither giving quarter, yielding only when a blade is at a major artery and they are both panting and sweaty and sore, everything drained out of them except the thrill of the fight. 

After one such go round where Meera has seen her blades go spinning away only to rally by slipping between his legs, the small dirk she keeps in her boot pressed to the tender inner skin of his thigh and his own sword at the back of her neck and they have declared a truce and a tie and they have both shed their armor to tunics and trews to splash away the dirt and sweat, his fingers wrapping around the bare skin of her upper arm is a thrill she doesn’t want to feel, his crooked half-smile self-deprecating and amused. “Your Ma…” He pauses and she sees that flicker from before move across his face, feels his grip ease into a stroke up and over her shoulder until his hand is large and firm and male on the back of her neck, exposed by her twisted and braided hair. “Meera.” His other hand comes up and trails over the scar that sits along her jaw, a souvenir from a blade that came much too close to her jugular. She feels the touch somewhere else entirely. 

The jerk she makes toward his touch rather than away does not go unnoticed and she can’t miss, from this close, how his eyes darken from whiskey to burnt honey gold in a blink, how his pupils expand. She knows that look, recognizes it, finds she is intrigued by it on his face when on others it has only left her cold and sick. The sixteen year old girl who loved him breathlessly, urgently, with all of her spoiled and childish heart, tries to rise from the ashes of the woman and is tamped down, mercilessly. She will not love him again but this, where she feels her body respond to him, feels her nipples pucker and her skin tremble and her knees almost buckle when he leans in closer and his warm breath feathers over her mouth, this she will have and take and revel in the flash and burn. 

His lips are softer than she expects, the kiss too tender and tentative, so it is Meera who rises on tiptoes, who fists her hands in the hair at the back of his head and yanks, whose tongue darts out to taste and lick and draws a low, pleased groan from his throat that vibrates through his broad chest into her breasts. She whimpers when he backs her into a nearby tree and lifts her until she can wind her legs around his waist, where he can grind himself against her where she aches and her hands can race recklessly over his back and he can nip his way down her throat and oh, Maker, she wants him to fuck her, she _wants_ him and it’s a revelation and a promise and terrifying that it is him, after all of this time, that can make her _feel_. 

His tent is spartan but large like her own, a bedroll, a small table and camp chair, a trunk, an armor and a weapon stand which he ignores because his squire and her shield maiden have already stowed their armor, already gone off to find their own amusements as darkness falls over the sprawling camp. They are too hasty for care, clothes falling like spoils of war around them, he growling and using his dagger on her stays when the ties snarl, she slipping her hand into his breeches and smalls with his laces only half undone. When he shoves her back and down amongst the furs and buries his tongue between her thighs, the pleasure is shocking and wicked and she is wild for him, arching and gasping and bucking, no play pretend, only real hot frantic want. 

“Say my name,” he demands suddenly, two of his fingers deep inside her slick channel, the other pressed over her left breast, over her galloping heart, and she blinks down at him, his blonde curls tousled and damp, his mouth slick and wet from tasting her, and he’s _looking_ at her, he _sees_ her, their past and their crimes and the pain and damage in between, his handsome, familiar, stranger’s face solemn and serious and patient and so much _need_. She cracks, breaks right apart for him, coming in his hand with a wail as his tongue flicks her clit. 

It is the first orgasm she has not given herself. 

OoO 

Cullen Rutherford is nearly thirty-two when he admits to being in love for the first, and last, time. He is pressing the swollen, weeping head of his cock into Meera Trevelyan, former Crown Princess of Ostwick, slave, pirate, Queen, when her hand cups his cheek and she says, softly, shyly, in such a perfect imitation of the young girl who loved him that he shudders, “Cullen,” and his heart simply falls at her feet, to step on or defend or smash. He moans, turning his cheek into her hand, as he slides into her hot, wet cunt, feeling her pulse and ripple as she attempts to adjust, a flicker of pain twisting her mouth. A conversation from months ago has him nearly jerking back, her name on his lips stunned and humbled, 

“Meera?” 

“Yes,” she whispers and when he shudders again, tries to pull away, she wraps arms and legs tight around him, lifts her hips to take him deeper, gasping at how full she feels, how he stretches her, wonderful and whole and so sweet. “Please.” Still he hesitates and, impatient, she shoves him over onto his back and down over him, taking him inside of her again with a sigh, palms balanced on his chest, head falling back. When she rolls her hips in a tight circle, squeezes her slick walls around his aching cock, he groans and arches beneath her, one hand on her hip, the other rising to pull the pins from her hair. 

It tumbles down haphazardly, long and wavy and red and gold and brown, and he remembers how it looked in the sunshine as she knelt in the soil and sank her fingers deep, her voice kind as she coaxed the flowers to bloom. He wants to take it slow, wants to make love to her instead of fucking her, wants to show her gentleness, but she is riding him, her short nails scoring his shoulders, her soft pink lips parted as she makes the most delicious, wicked sounds, and so instead he sits up, palming the rounded curve of her ass. Their sounds of pleasure mingle in the air as this changes the angle of his penetration, scraping over something delicious inside of her that has Meera squirming and Cullen cursing, the sharp points of her nipples rasping through the dark golden hair on his chest as he uses his grip on her to bounce her up and down his cock. She licks his ear, his throat, the burn scars she can reach, tasting salt and musk and iron on his skin, her fingertips mapping the whip scars on his back that match those on her own. He nips her shoulder, her collarbone, her nipple, his fingers sliding between them to find and circle her swollen, sensitive clit, and she comes again, this time around his cock, pulsating and hot and so very tight, and she hears him grunt then sigh as he spills inside of her, his face buried in the curve of her neck. 

“Cullen,” she whispers once they’ve both caught their breath and sweat is cooling on overheated skin, kissing the corner of his mouth as he cards his fingers through her hair. He hmms back in return, brushes her hair back over her shoulders so he can press featherlight kisses to her neck and she sighs and says, “She died on that ship.” 

His thumbs rub over her cheekbones as he eases back and studies her face, this girl and woman and Queen he loves, and wishes, just for a moment, that he will not have to let her go, his wild pirate, his sweet girl, his broken dragon slayer. “I love you,” is all he says and watches the wariness in her eyes grow. He knows apologizing will not change his mistakes or her mind, so he presses her back into the furs and loves her slowly, with care and gentleness, and pretends he can keep her safe and close and whole. 

No one in the camp raises even a token protest when the Queen's arms and armor and trunk are moved into the Commander's tent. Dorian smirks and Sera laughs and the Chargers quietly bully the Commander into drinking with them until Krem declares he’s all right which really means it’s okay that he’s fucking their favorite person aside from Bull and Cole watches and he worries and he waits until he can corner Meera. 

“He has a heart.” The Queen’s gaze turns cold but she waits because Cole has saved her more than once when she didn’t see the danger, has been her eyes and her ears and her friend. He touches her hesitantly on the shoulder and says, “Yours is broken. He wants to fix it. He knows he did it, some of it, and he’s sorry.” 

Tears are a woman’s weapon, one Meera despises, and she will not shed them now as Cole presses his cheek to hers. “You need him, solid and strong, protecting and proud. You needed him then and you need him now.” 

Need. It is a weak word, Meera thinks, weak and smacking of desperation. She desires him, certainly, and expects that desire to ease any day into boredom and familiarity even as they fuck in their tent, against a tree, in a cool stream and hot desert pool, in the camp chair, over the war table after a council meeting, her mouth on his cock, his lips on her breasts, pleasure and moans and his seed spilling into her near daily as he whispers, shouts, groans that he loves her. She admires him, his loyalty, his honor, his fairness; he is a complement to her in every way and together they have backed his former lover into a corner, forcing her to fight or flight where all of her escape routes are traps. He is a good man, a worthy man, a man she will not, cannot love. 

The bastard daughter of the pretender Queen is killed by a poisoned sword but not without leaving a wound of her own. “He laughed at you.” The raven haired woman is not so beautiful now pumping out life with every cough, eyes glassy with pain and rage and bitterness. “He knew you loved him and still he laughed at you.” 

Meera does not bother to remove any of the blood staining her skin or clotting in her hair, her only concession to anyone’s vanity is the armor her shield maiden is cleaning as she strides into the war council. She glares fiercely across the table at Cullen when Josephine asks if she needs a surgeon. “It’s not hers,” he says before she can and the gentle, soft, grateful look in his eyes, the way he presses her against the door and kisses her sweet and slow and thorough, the way he whispers into her ear how beautiful she is, how wild and gorgeous and brave, nearly tears her in two the way nothing else ever has: in that moment, Meera believes Cullen loves her, and it’s the most wrenching, terrifying agony in her entire life. 

Sitting in the bath, her back to his front, his knuckles rasping back and forth across her sensitive nipples, she probes at the wound his lover has left. “She said your name. When I killed her.” 

“No, she didn’t,” he returns, and he nips her shoulder and then the place under her ear that always makes her shiver, his breath joining the steam rising from the tub in a caress over her skin as one hand slips over her belly under the water. “She told you I already knew you loved me, that I was cruel to you on purpose.” Tension that is not about his cock pressed against her back, stiff and ready, or about the fingertips slipping into the curls protecting her cunt to tease her slit has muscles clenching and water sloshing over the tub as she tries to pull away, his hand on her breast keeping her in place. “Stop that,” he says mildly, one long, deft finger slipping inside of her and curling up, toward her belly, thumb pressing hard over her clit, and the moan that escapes is somewhere between rage and lust as Meera’s hips buck and his fingers pluck at her nipples, alternating between the throbbing peaks. “She hated you,” he continues conversationally as if he isn’t driving her higher and higher, pumping his finger in and out of her so very slowly, adding a second when she gasps and arches her back and her cunt spasms. “She hated that I talked about you, that I admired your quick intelligence and your rare snorting laugh and how creatively you tried to cheat at chess.” If it’s a lie, if he’s lying, it’s a good one, made all the more effective as his thumb strokes her clit and he scissors his thick fingers inside of her and sinks his teeth into the pulse point at her neck and growls, the sound vibrating through her, around her, in her. 

Aware that she’s listening as much as she’s feeling, Cullen nuzzles her throat, her ear, her shoulder, increasing the speed and pressure of his fingers inside of her, of the flick of his thumb over the swollen, aching center of her pleasure, willing her to listen, to know, to believe. “I wasn't all hers, you see. I was yours more, in some ways, your knight, your shield, your friend.” She pants and mewls and arches, her nails digging into the muscles of his arms as she writhes, and she fights him, fights the pleasure, fights the past, fights the truth she can’t, won’t believe, fights her own treacherous, needy, foolish heart. “I fucked her and I cared about you.” She sobs when he forces her over the edge with his agile fingers, sobs and keens and sinks her teeth into his skin, rakes her nails down his arms as she comes and thrashes and blames him for making her remember, for making her trust him again, for whispering into her hair, “I failed you, Meera, I failed you, I failed you.” 

“No.” She says it quietly, her voice wrecked and wretched from the screams she's given him, each one like a gift, the last his name, over and over, as he spilled life inside of her empty heart. Her fingers are playing with his hair, the curls catching on her callused fingers, damp with sweat and still soft, his cheek pillowed on her breast, and she says it again, the one word, “No.” 

The girl hiding inside of her slithers in and curls protectively around the woman she's become and they rock slowly together, whispering secrets and pain and the first tentative, alarmed stirrings of hope. Cullen is suddenly steeped in her affection, in her care: a new sword, a well-tooled saddle, a lock of her hair tied with ribbon pressed in among a stack of reports, a frivolous afternoon spent on the riverbank where she seduces him in the water and lies curled next to him in the sun, her hand on his heart, her lips on his throat. Sometimes, deep in the night when one or both of them wake from the nightmares of torture and imprisonment and helplessness, she will tell him some strange, fantastic story that he's almost sure she's created out of whole cloth on the spot and they will giggle like children and pull the furs over their heads and she will love him slowly, languorously, with words that aren't weapons but rewards. 

It can't last, he knows it can't with the deep, painful drag of despair, but he will hold on to it with greedy hands until it's over, until it's over and she's left him and he's alone again. 

A letter comes to her and she is denied her final slice of vengeance: the pretender Queen is dead by her own hand, her generals willing to swear fealty. The last bit of resistance has ended and the kingdom, finally, can be at peace. Cullen is fiercely proud when Meera accepts their kneeling, her dragonscale armor shimmering in the sun, her face calm and serene, and he is desolate, too, because she has already started to pull away from him, to ease the transition for him from her lover to only the Commander of her forces, as she must marry for treaties and grain and gold and heirs and not for lust. She never bars him from her bed but she does not come to his and duties and court and executions and rebuilding keep a distance between them that was never there before, she distracted and pale and always tired. He is her Commander and her shield, and she is his Queen. It is a chasm he never thought to want, to have to, to need, to cross. He comforts himself with the promise that he will not abandon her as he did before, not in word or deed or action or thought, and so he stays and accepts what little she has to give. 

Why he doesn't ask her what she wants when people are clamoring for her to rule, when she _is_ ruling in all but name and title and rank, he will think of only later, when it's too late. Always, always with Meera, he is too late. 

King Roark asks. He asks while she is on her knees in her expensive silk gown in one of the gardens of the castle, her fingers buried in the dirt, humming tunelessly under her breath, their mother sitting quietly under a parasol with a bit of embroidery, Sera and Krem and Bull at attention a discreet distance away. “I don't want to be Queen,” she admits, drawing a gasp from her mother, a gentle look from Roark, and various snorts and even some gold changing hands among her friends. 

She blinks, sinks back onto her heels, looks down at the trowel in her hand, at the pretty yellow tulip that she’s just planted nodding in the bright spring sun, at the rich brown soil under her buffed nails. “I don’t want to be Queen,” she repeats in wonder, and the smile she offers to her mother and her brother has them both smiling back, her eyes sparkling, a dimple flashing in her cheek, the pure, sweet face they both remember, marked as it is now by the passage of time and life and scars. Her brother reaches out, lays a hand on her shoulder, his eyes, blue as winter ice, old and wise, worried in his man-child's face, his scruff of down reminding her of a defenseless baby chick. He is not, though, this boy who grew to be a man, who has been raised to be a King, who knows of war and famine and strife and court and courtesy and forgiveness. “What _do_ you want?” he asks again. 

It’s not a question she’s ever thought to have the time, opportunity, or freedom to answer honestly. Looking now at her brother, her mother, her friends, of the gardens spread out around her, thinking of the man who this morning slipped from her body and her bed with a gentle kiss, with a softly whispered promise to come to her at the end of her day, of the little blue bottles she’s ignored for nigh on two months, she realizes she’s known the answer all along. “I want to grow.” 

King Roark smiles and hugs her and murmurs softly, with love, a love that blooms in her heart, deep and true, “My sister.” He promises, and delivers, what she wants in less than a day. 

Meera has survived a luxurious childhood steeped in humiliation, a painful adolescence shaped by violence, and a bloody, brutal, four year war for her kingdom. It is her twenty-fifth birthday when she saddles her mare, Saoirse, and leaves the capitol, the kingdom, and the crown in the capable hands of her brother. 

She leaves a little blue bottle, a tattered treasure map, and a well-worn black Queen from a familiar chess set lying on Cullen’s pillow, secure in the knowledge that after all of this time, he will find her. 

OoO 

It takes Cullen two months, the most endless, frustrating, terrified two months of his entire thirty-five years, to find her on the small, beautiful beach, her toes buried in the sand, wearing a loose, flowing dress that ripples in the wind like her long, unbound hair, smiling at him in welcome. He gathers the gauzy, filmy material in his fists until he finds what he's been hoping, dreading, needing to find since Dorian explained to him what the little blue bottle she’d left on his pillow was for. His open palms spread over the slight curve of the baby inside of her, the one they'd made together, the one she'd refused to deny with the little blue bottle, the little blue bottle he has tucked in his saddlebags with the chess piece and the map, a relic of their past and a token of their future. 

Speechless wonder in his eyes and the shaking of his hands has Meera cuddling into him, pressing her lips to his throat and her hands over his. His words tremble when he whispers brokenly into her hair, “Why?” Her gentle movements against him cause a stir, lust tangling with surprise as he jolts: she is not wearing a weapon of any kind. 

“That’s not the right question,” she whispers, rising on tiptoes so that their baby bumps against his belly, this life they’ve made between them already so precious and unexpected and new. His body shudders against hers, curls around her and their child, protective and gentle and welcome, and Meera knows, suddenly, he might never believe he is worthy of her love. In some ways, she understands, he is as broken as she. “Cullen,” she whispers against his ear, just his name, softly, and again as he sweeps her up into his arms, her hand settling over his heart, the beat unsteady and fast and familiar. 

The little house by the sea is weathered and grey and tidy, the bed big and soft, and when he lowers her down as if she is made of glass, when he strips away the dress and her few underpinnings and presses his lips over the swell of her belly, she can’t stop the tears, joy and relief and a twinge of shame that she made him worry. He brushes them away with his thumbs, soothes her with sweet, gentle caresses that turn into languid, lazy pleasure, and when he is buried to the hilt inside of her, he kisses her, long and slow and deep, and she whispers into his mouth, “I love you, Cullen. I love you, I love you, I love you.” 

He is hollowed out, reformed and remade as they love, as she whispers and shouts and cries their truth into his skin, promises and pleas and everything he was too afraid to believe but that he has wanted since she stood in her armor, wary and wicked and beautiful, and promised him an army. When she clenches and flutters around him, arms and legs and body holding him tight, he empties himself into her and knows the right question: “Are you going to make me beg or are you going to marry me?” 

Her laughter is like sunlight and Cullen is content and grateful and humbled to bask in the warmth. 

OoO 

“Shall I tell you a story, sweetling?” 

A soft hum and burrow and then, “The Warrior Queen.” 

“Again?” 

Little hands and pretty eyes and dimpled cheeks crowned by a curly mess of blonde hair peek out, a long-suffering, familiar look. The soft, gentle whisper of laughter is accompanied by the quick smacking sound of a kiss. “Demon.” 

“She _is_ your daughter.” There is amused affection in the voice and two pairs of matching green eyes turn to the door where a man lounges in soft tan breeches and a cream linen tunic, his feet bare, his face relaxed and slightly windburnt, his whiskey colored eyes soft with love. When the only answer he receives is two females ducking under the covers with giggles and an inelegant but beloved snort, he stalks over to the bed and falls on them in a tangle of sun-warmed limbs and growls, long fingers finding and exploiting the arch of a tiny foot or what used to be the curve of a waist but is now overtaken by the babe that sits low and which everyone promises them will be a handsome wild boy to match their pretty mischievous daughter. 

Submission comes in the form of a toddler tucked against his chest, her chubby cheeks pillowed on her tiny hands, and a woman curled on her side in front of their little girl, holding his hand over her womb where their son does somersaults and makes her complain halfheartedly about needing the privy. As the sun peeks through the gauzy curtains around the bed, Cullen drifts lazily toward sleep and wonders, not for the first time, if he has any right to be quite so happy. 

“Stop,” Meera whispers, turning to face him, reaching out to trail fingertips over his cheek. “The Warrior Queen demands her Commander relax.” 

Cullen grimaces but kisses her fingertips. “That's Magistrate to you, lady wife.” 

The small body between them shakes her head negatively and lifts a dimpled hand. “Mama.” Mari pats her mother's face. “Da.” She pats her father's, yawns, snuggles deeper into the space between them. “Brudder.” She slips easily into dreams with her hand on Meera's belly. 

With a chuckle, Cullen leans in until his forehead is pressed to Meera's. “Do you think she knows the story you tell her is about you?” 

Meera’s smile is sweet and knowing and pure, the smile of a woman who has survived, who has conquered, who has grown, who is secure in the love of the people who matter the most. She is no longer the sad Crown Princess, the deposed nobody, or the warrior Queen, but more, a wife and mother and sister and daughter, a friend and confidante. She rubs her lips lightly against Cullen’s, her husband, twines their fingers together, and lays them over their daughter’s over the child in her belly. “The story is about us, Cullen. And it’s the greatest story we could ever give her.” 

They sleep curled together, the small family, and outside in the breeze, their garden blooms, wild and free. 


End file.
